Tue, 29 Jul 2008

What do you know, it is Tuesday afternoon and I have a 1 litre UHT container
of the yummiest milk sold sitting in my office ready for a bit of Tuesday
afternoon milk carton blogging.

They add oats to this soy milk to give us Vitasoy Heart, so most of the
Vitasoy milks are already among the
yummiest available (definitely superior to So Good), however this one really
is fantastic. Now if only more supermarkets stocked it.

Fri, 25 Jul 2008

Cold typing solution - 15:56
So the heating is playing up a lot at my place currently, either on hot all
night or not coming on and the controller displaying a flashing spanner. All
manner of problems that mean the gas bill is stupidly high and yet we are
often cold. Last night it was off and thus when I got out of bed this morning
it was 9 degrees Celsius inside. Hopefully with some heating technicians coming
back and forth, last week, today and again twice next week it will all be
working again by the end of next week.

However one thing I discovered this morning, when it is really cold and you
have a laptop with aluminium palm rests such as my dell xps m1330, metal can
be mighty cold to rest ones palms on when typing. It made typing a little bit
uncomfortable. When I mentioned this dilemma to an academic at work he made a
rather interesting suggestion. I should simply run some CPU and disk intensive
job on the laptop for 20 minutes before I sit down to use the machine, by that
point there should be enough heat around the keyboard to use it more
comfortably. What a thinker.

Thu, 24 Jul 2008

Wines from Plonk! - 17:32
So I had been wondering what to get my mother for her 60th birthday
celebrations, the actual celebration is tomorrow even though her birthday was
yesterday. However I will give her a gift tomorrow, I feel I can safely write
about it here as she never actually reads this unless bludgeoned with a link
to a particular entry.

It occurred to me that Mum and her partner drink wine with food and like to
try out a variety of different wines. After getting some wine recommendations
from Jane I set about finding somewhere to buy some nice wines from
knowledgeable staff. I had Plonk at the
Fyshwick Markets suggested and they sounded good as they focus on smaller
labels and more variety than you may find from a large bottle shop chain.

I grabbed my car from home at lunch today and drove over to have a look, I
walked away with what I think will be a reasonably nice gift of 8 bottles of
wine from them, 6 whites and two reds. The wines I got are.

Lake George - Pinot Gris

Lake George - Shiraz

Brindabella Hills - Chardonnay

Pikes Clare Valley - Reisling

Krinklewood - Verdelho

Pizzini - Sangiovese

Tohu - Sauvignon Blanc

Garden Gully - Sparkling Shiraz

The Tohu comes from Marlborough region of New Zealand, apparently this is
quite an award winning wine. Three of the wines as you can see are very much
local and the others are all Australian. I liked the guys I talked to in the
shop and we even talked about the possibility of them supporting some mountain
bike stuff with CORC.

Mon, 21 Jul 2008

My weekend in food - 13:47
So over the weekend I was down in Melbourne, I ate a lot and did a fair amount
of shopping. (one of the items of clothing I bought were some new Jeans, made
by Helly Hanson, how cool is that, I can sort of think of it as if I were
buying outdoor/race gear made by Helly Hanson and it is instead functional
clothing I wear the rest of the time). Anyway one of the things that occurred
over the weekend was consumption of a lot of really yummy food.

I suppose I could say it all started on Friday evening before catching the
flight down when I made some pizzas topped with organic tomato paste, onions,
pumpkin, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, capsicum, sun-dried tomatoes and
kingland soy cheese. Yummmm, ate too much and then got a lift to the airport,
the plane was running late which was fortunate because dinner took a bit
longer than expected.

Saturday morning Soulfood Cafe
was the venue for breakfast, Jane (sister) was in Melbourne for a few weeks
for PhD conferences and research, also a mtb friend moved to Melbourne
recently and is living a block or two away from Soul food in Fitzroy so they
were at breakfast to catch up. Had a yummy chocolate cup cake, a blueberry
muffin, a big veggie breakfast and a fruit salad, oh and a great soy mocha.

Lunch was had at Vegie Bar with a
slightly laksa like broth that contained some very good sesame dumplings, some
good Roti with Dhal and then a spectacular stuffed vegan mushroom. Dinner that
night was at Lentil As Anything in St
Kilda, getting there late there was not a lot left, however what was there was
fantastic. A really yummy spicy pumpkin soup followed by a curry platter (a
beetroot curry that worked well due to the sweet beetroot and savoury curry,
a Moroccan hot pot curry and a pea and potato curry of some sort. Both the
dishes were served with good Roti once again. At the end of this day I was
somewhat full of food and almost rolling around the streets I think.

Sunday morning was breakfast at InVita
Cafe at the Queen Vic markets, they had fresh out of the oven hot vegan
blueberry muffins that were to die for which I followed with scrambled tofu on
pumpkin bread. Lunch was at Silly
Yaks cafe in Northcote where I was able to tuck into a Mexican bean
burrito with salad and a good bruschetta (the bread had an obvious potato
taste but was actually fairly good I thought). This was followed a few metres
down the road at Coco Loco, an
organic, fair trade chocolate bar. They had vegan Chocolate Mousse that was
fantastic, rich, creamy, held its fluff and worked really well (something I
really want to work out how to make, maybe using agar and soft tofu in a
blender will help... who knows), vegan waffles in deep rich dark chocolate and
they had something they call Kashew Mylk, somewhat obviously a milk made using
Cashews. So I had a rich dark chocolate and orange hot chocolate with the
Kashew Mylk. All very satisfying.

At one point on Saturday evening I had wanted a snack and
Lord of the Fries seemed
appropriate. So I had a cone of fries with French Canadian sauce (using vegan
cheese) and damn that was good (though definitely waistline expanding) this on
Sunday afternoon heading toward the airport I wanted to try out their Vegan
nuggets, alas they were out of stock, however I had more fries with the same
sauce and a yummy vegan hamburger. Then ran for the airport thinking the plane
would be leaving before I got there. Upon arrival at the airport they rushed
the checking and then the plane was delayed for 2 hours. Oh well I had a fun,
if somewhat waist expanding Melbourne weekend.

Tue, 15 Jul 2008

Waiting for workmen and trying to offend - 13:26
I know of a t-shirt I would love to wear on occasion (say in Sydney this week)
that says
"I
found jesus, he was behind the couch" (that sounds like a very
fafblog sort of thing to say
too). All this reminds me of my
attempt to
really offend some religious types one easter in the Friday morning mtb
email. It amuses me often when I see how far Paul's scripts in Good News Week
go toward trying to offend pretty much anyone. (though the content here is
definitely toned down when compared with most Doug Anthony All Stars material
he dealt with).

Last night for example he was talking about the young priests pinup calendar
(makes me wonder more about the WYD stuff when they have such a calendar) and
Paul commented it is not so unusual to have pinups, after all Jesus was the
first pinup in the church. Oh and more offence against WYD, I liked the
expansion of WYD SYD I saw recently, Would You Do Some Young Dude.

On the waiting for workman thing, I know everyone experiences it and has to
deal with it, however I was at home for a while today as I had a call from a
company coming to look at the heating to learn why it is playing up. I was
told sometime between 11am and 1pm, which is kind of annoying when you have to
leave work for that period, and many people would need a day off for that sort
of gap, and it is no where near as bad as some of the telstra things when they
give you a half day period. I got home at 11am, did vacuuming for a while,
some other cleaning, lay down and read the newspaper, etc. There are a pile of
things to do at work and I was not doing them, though I guess I should have
taken a laptop home with me to do some work while waiting. So partly my fault
(I thought of that when I got home at 11am, ahh well).

Fri, 11 Jul 2008

Causing scenes - 13:50
This is not an important Internet resource, however it is yet another example
of being able to find out about cool stuff happening elsewhere in the world
thanks to the Internet. I have known about this group and some of their stunts
for a while (2 years or so maybe, though it is fascinating to see they have
been doing this stuff since 2002 or so). I finally felt I should talk about it
here because they just keep doing really cool stuff.

From the title you may have guessed I am talking about
Improv Everywhere. The group
started in New York, the idea is they think up some harmless but strange stunt
to pull in public and then go an do it en masse. The idea is that if you saw
one or maybe two people doing this it would not be unusual, however to see 100
people or more doing something strange all at once, with all of them claiming
to have no knowledge of the others. That becomes a form of mass performance
art.

The recent stunt with
twins on a
train (hmm they could make a snakes on a plane rip off t-shirt for this
stunt) is a fantastic example of being able to think of something unique to
brighten the days of many people who stumble upon it, also doing something so
unusual as rounding up all those twins to pull it off successfully. Many of
their other missions are
clever and fascinating to see how they turned out in public. One I thought
stood out as well performed and interesting though not on such a grand scale
was The
Moebius, looping through the same 5 minute performance in public at a
Starbucks and seeing how people there notice it as it happens over and over
again. I thought my cousin Nick would appreciate this one a lot (though he is
likely to enjoy the whole concept anyway).

It is good to note other chapters have popped up around the world (including
one in Sydney (I wonder if Nick already participates). Anyway some
fascinating things to see that this group has done.

Tue, 08 Jul 2008

How to capture one image from a v4l2 device - 17:22
So after seeing Mikal wondering about it again yesterday, I had a look at some
source code, decided that it could be done but it would be nicer to do it with
existing software. I recalled seeing ffmpeg or mplayer commands that may in
theory be able to do a capture of a single image. Then I stumbled upon a way
to do this with gstreamer filters and sinks.

As one command captures the image at that resolution into a file foo.png. This
is on my laptop, however I tested this with the QuickCam 9000 on my desktop
with a resolution of 1600x1200 and it worked, the focus meant it took a while
but it popped out a good image. Gstreamer really is cool, I still remember
seeing Federico talk about GMF (Gnome Media Framework, which is what became
GStreamer) at CALU in 1999 and being excited by it.

Mon, 07 Jul 2008

Science Fiction Hands - 17:14
So I know I should not throw stones, however I almost can not help this, Mikal
has a recent post with the title "
On the potentially
sorry state of second science fiction hand book stores in Sydney", making
me wonder why you would go looking for a second science fiction hand? Did he
lose his first science fiction hand? I guess when you recall that these are
science fiction hands he is looking for, a book store is as good a place as
any to look for one. (I know Mikal probably meant to say "Second hand science
fiction book store" but who knows, maybe he really has a need for more than
one science fiction hand.)

Of note if Mikal has a day or two spare to spend looking for cool books in
Sydney the ultimate second hand book store is the institution known as Goulds
in Newtown. I say you newed a day or two as nothing seems to be sorted well,
however there are many treasures to be stumbled upon all over the two stores.

As for v4l2 software I also note there are no easy ways to capture images from
v4l2 webcams, I can easily capture a video stream with a few applications and
than splice it, though trying to do that in headless mode is not as easy. I
have a quickcam pro 9000 on my desk to play with and this laptop has a built
in uvc based camera, I was contemplating writing an image grabber to use v4l2,
however have no real need for the images yet so had not done so.

Cooking breakages - 13:40
On Saturday night while cooking three of the yummy recipes from
Veganomicon (the
book Davyd has referred to a
bit). (the recipes were "Greek style tomato zucchini fritters with fresh
herbs", "Jamaican yuca shepards pie with sweet potato kidney beans and
plantains" (though we used purple sweet potato and banana), and "eggplant
potato moussaka with pine nut cream". We followed this with a yummy chocolate
cake with soy cream cheese with lemon and jam filling and chocolate with
fresh berry icing) I managed to break some cooking implements.

While I was trying to press some ingredients down into a blender I cracked the
handle of one wooden spoon. So I got another wooden spoon out of the drawer
and then while pushing the same ingredients down I pushed a little too far and
the blender tore a chunk from the middle of the spoon. Oops too wooden spoons
sacrificed in the name of the dinner party. All the food was incredibly yummy,
the 12 people at the dinner all had a great evening and all I really need to
do now is go and buy myself more wooden spoons. Maybe I had better buy a few
spares. Oh and no one there was allergic to wooden spoons, so all was fine.

Fri, 04 Jul 2008

Looking for some ingredients - 14:18
So for something I wish to cook the recipe suggests
Cassava (Yuca, Tapioca)
and Plantain. So sure I
could possibly get away with sweet potato and banana. However the recipe
already contains sweet potato as well and the banana (even with green
bananas) may not be quite right. So I was wondering where in Canberra I could
possibly get these ingredients. I rang some organic food stores and they have
Tapioca flour, however none of them have the roots whole.

I have also rung a few Asian grocery shops, one of them said they had Cassava
so I could head out there, however I have not found Plantains yet. I guess I
should check out the Fyshwick Markets tomorrow to see if I have any luck
there.

Wed, 02 Jul 2008

The Shadow of the Wind - 18:10
I have not had much time to read books in the last month, however just before
Geoquest someone handed me a copy of the Carlos Ruiz Zafon book
The Shadow
of the Wind suggesting that it is a good read. I had some spare time up at
Geoquest to sit and
read it in
the sunshine however did not finish the book until this week, I have been
home sick on Monday and Wednesday (today) this week so apart from sleeping I
also finished reading the book.

I like this book a lot, I do not notice any clumsiness in language or similar
that can sometimes appear in translated works. The story is rather
interesting, Daniel and all the people surrounding him constantly have new
facets open up concerning their characters. I also think it shows some
interesting aspects of Barcelona, though I have not been there so do not know
how accurate the depictions are. The book with in a book aspects in the story
are also interesting, and I like the concept of the cemetery of forgotten
books. Definitely a good read, and though I may be tempted I had better not
spoil any of the story for anyone who may read it.